Anyone of Silesian German Heritage?

wintermute

wintermute

Joined
Oct 18, 2007
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Sorry, A.W.U.K.'s post on Cornish heritage got me thinking...

My family was originally from Silesia, which used to be part of Germany until some point in WW2. Now it's part of Poland. Due to the upheaval, it's hard to really find pre-war records on families and places. Just curious if there's anyone with roots from this area and if they have any good sources of info to share...
 
My wife is Silesian German, or at least her family was until Poland under the Communists outlawed the German language and such.

She's asleep with the flu right now, but if you have specific info, I bet her family in Katowice (bout an hour from Cracow) could look some stuff up for you or at least maybe find the right direction to look.
 
I'm half-silesian. My mother's family fled Breslau when the red army marched in.
Since I'm also half-rhinelander, we're still quite wealthy, so I never really bothered with checking out Silesia. It will never come back, that's final.

There are some websites about silesia and genealogy, but most of them are in german. I'd simply start with googling for "Schlesien" or "Silesia".

You'll find that silesians are very very quite compared to other groups of similar size. For example, just take a look at scotts or irish - they are just a handful of people in comparison to other nations (in fact, my state alone has 20 milion citizens...), but they seek (and get) as much attention as RUSSIA.

Did you know that the red baron (Manfred von Richthofen) was silesian? The current german pesident is also silesian.
Dig deeper, you'd be surprised.
 
Northrhine-Westphalia. It's the german state with the biggest population. We have 16 states.
You could fit all the people of austria and switzerland into my state and still have room left. ;)
 
DocArnie said:
Did you know that the red baron (Manfred von Richthofen) was silesian? The current german pesident is also silesian.
Dig deeper, you'd be surprised.
Click to expand...

Richthofen actually lived relatively close to my family - my family farm was in Willmannsdorf in Kreis Jauer (now Stanislawow in Jawor county) - not too far from Schweidnitz. I've found on the internet my family's name in a 1939 addressbuch, but since there's just a number after the name, I have no idea how I would locate exactly where in the village that they lived. There's some nice photos of the village on Google Earth.

If anyone's interested in sharing information sources, feel free to e-mail me at wintermute2.0 [at] gmail [dot] com. I'd be happy to share the tidbits I've dug up.

It's my father that came from Germany. My mother's family was from Hungarybut had been in the U.S. for a few generations and modified their name, so that's a project for another day.
 
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